How to translate ecological topics into age-appropriate lessons and encourage real-life action towards a sustainable future?
The team of a Product Designer, a Product Manager and a Full Stack Developer behind EcoBear set out to create a mobile app with gamification that inspires school-level kids to embrace sustainable living through fun and interactive experience.
My Work
Branding
Research
UX/UI Design
Character Design
Animation
Prototyping
User Testing
We designed a playful and friendly brand that resonates with children through engaging visuals, bright colors, and a character—Frosty the polar bear.
Character Design
At the core of the brand is the main character: polar bear Frosty. He is the main communicator with the users. He is expressive and engaging while he reacts to the player's progress—cheering them on when they succeed and showing concern when things need improvement. His friendly and encouraging tone makes learning about sustainability feel fun and rewarding, creating an emotional connection that keeps users engaged throughout their journey.
Through design, user testing, and iterative improvements, we created an app that combines education with gamification. The app offers daily challenges, quizzes, and a gamified system to encourage consistent learning and positive habits.
With dynamic features like Frosty’s evolving environment, point collection, and school-wide sustainability tracking, users stay motivated through visual progress, friendly competition, and collective impact.
Growing the Bear & Iceberg
By completing daily challenges, users help Frosty grow from a cub to a grown bear as well as expand his iceberg. This mechanic visually reinforces the importance of sustainable choices. If challenges are ignored, the iceberg shrinks, showing the consequences of inaction in a way that’s easy to understand.
Collecting points
Users collect points by answering quizzes in the Level Up section to test their knowledge of sustainability topics. The users can see their ranking on the leaderboard that fosters a sense of friendly competition.
Consumption
In the Consumption section, users can monitor their school’s sustainability performance in areas such as electricity usage, heating efficiency, and overall environmental impact. This feature promotes teamwork and collective responsibility, helping children understand how individual actions contribute to a larger positive change.
We conducted 5 user interviews with children aged 6-12 to gain insights into how they perceive and interact with the app, ensuring that the experience is engaging, intuitive, and enjoyable for our young audience.
The feedback from our user interviews was positive, with children finding Frosty engaging and the app’s interactive elements fun and easy to use. Their enthusiasm confirmed that the playful approach resonated well with our audience. At the same time, the sessions helped us identify key challenges, such as areas where instructions could be clearer and certain activities could be more intuitive.
To assess long-term engagement, children used the app over a two-week period, allowing us to observe their interactions and habits. The experimental phase revealed that the most visited screen was the leaderboard, indicating a strong motivation to track progress and compete. Users consistently returned to the leaderboard, intentionally checking their rankings and actively playing the quiz to secure the top spot. This behavior highlighted the effectiveness of gamification in driving engagement and reinforcing learning through friendly competition.
“This game is a lot better than I expected.”
User 1
*Excited about the bear growing*
User 2
“I really like the leaderboard is showing how much points you have, so you can be proud.”
User 3
We created an app that makes sustainability education fun and engaging for children. Through gamification, visual clues, and interactive challenges, we built an experience that keeps users motivated while reinforcing eco-friendly habits.
User testing showed promising feedback, with strong engagement driven by Frosty’s evolving environment and the competitive leaderboard. EcoBear teaches that small actions can add up to meaningful change, inspiring the next generation to care for our planet.
